Tolerance cannot be measured in terms of degrees of intolerance. I am essentially opposed to burning books even when they incite others to violence. But freedom is either an absolute or it is conditioned on not inciting others to violence. Anything else is rationalized bigotry.

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Sunday, June 19, 2016

The BREXIT Campaign – The Facts

We will soon be voting on
whether to remain members of the grand European project or to leave it.I present below some observations.

Britain is
currently the world's fifth largest economy based on total Gross Domestic
Product (GDP) – Britain’s
GDP currently stands at $2.8 trillion. The list below (at least in terms of
relative position) agrees with the World Bank, UN and CIA world Factbook
position on global GDP trends.

World trade declined 1.7% in
the first three months of 2016.It is
this trend that is the main threat to British prosperity and not the hysterical
projection of BREXIT proposed by champions of the Remain campaign.

The reverse projection, bumper
growth, would put Britain on
course to become the world's fourth largest economic powerhouse ahead of an
ageing Japan and Germany in the
2030s, according to the Centre for Economic & Business Research’s latest
world economic league table. The total
cash value of the UK economy
will grow to around $4.7 trillion by 2031, but is expected to be quickly
overtaken by Brazil
in fourth spot by the 2040s.

The UK is the fifth biggest economy in
the world.44% of our exports go to the
EU. However, the EU benefits from maintaining a healthy economic relationship
with us to a far greater degree.Britain in the
year ending 2015 had a £68 billion trade deficit with the EU.So no, the European Union is not going to
threaten us with dire consequences when the potential material damage would be
far worse for them than for us.

Europe is declining in financial
importance while Asia and South America are
ascendant.The EU currently represents
about 20% of Global trade but that percentage is declining. It is estimated
that in the future the EU will be no more than 10% of the global economy.The EU has no trade deals with the worlds’
largest economy (the USA).Nor does the EU have trade deals with Brazil, India,
Australia, or China.If we left the EU we would remain its biggest
single export market.

We are a net contributor to
the EU budget (we give Europe £10.1 billion per year more than we receive from Europe).The
Remain campaign focuses on the £350 million that the exit campaigners remind us,
is sent to Brussels
bureaucrats every week, to be spent by unelected European politicians.They aren’t entirely straight
with us. We receive in terms of university, research and agricultural grants
(amongst other items) £156 million per week from the European Union. That still
leaves Britain
with a net figure of £194 million per week haemorrhaging from British coffers. This is where the excess payment figure of £10.1
billion originates.

I do not have a principled
objection to paying money into an integrated Europe except that Europe is neither integrated nor is it unified towards
one purpose.I will explain.

A friend of mine is a keen
cyclist who likes to follows the route of the Tour de France on his bicycle. He does cycling trips around Europe.On his trips to Spain he has observed that there
are entire stretches of A-class road that he and his friends would cycle along
where they would not see a single car, often for many kilometers.The hundreds of millions of Euros those roads
cost to build across Spain
were simply the visual manifestation ‘proving’ the power and influence of
corrupt local Spanish politicians.There
was no local benefit to their construction, there was certainly no regional or
national purpose served by their planning and implementation.

What those empty, meandering
roads epitomized were the corruption as well as the greed at the heart of the
current European project.That attitude
we know from history is core to any project or grand historical scheme
benefiting entrenched tribes or factions usually at the expense of some other
tribe or faction.The issue the EU faces
today is that there is no accountability and no public recognition that
anything is wrong.

The reluctance to forego any
diminution of its own financial benefit is the big problem killing the EU –
corruption facilitates decline, it does not engender democracy, human rights or
world peace.Corruption creates national
bottlenecks that embitter the losing faction (the ones missing out on all those
truckloads of cash). ‘Priorities’ may be
significant for one nation but completely insignificant for another.

The EU, if it is to
successfully pool its resources and focus on integration of all of its citizens
has lots of questions it is not even beginning to discuss. For instance: If
countries have entirely different pension or taxation policies then their
individual cost and revenue streams are going to be always out of
synchronization with each other. Inequality breeds exploitation and
resentment.If the people in each
country in the union do not enjoy the same opportunities then the basis for a
stable relationship does not exist. Good governance is measured by equality of
risk. That also means however that in order for the EU to succeed it must have fiscal
integration as an end target and that requires uniformity of fiscal
policy.Without it, the perception of
institutionalized corruption will continue to drag down the EU project.
Shouldn’t we be addressing those issues?

In the United States of America
there are 50 states and the District of Colombia. Only the federal government is permitted to
run a deficit while individual states are forbidden to do so.But then, the EU is not a federated system
but a confederation. The difference is crucial.A confederation is a union of States individually maintaining primary
sovereignty over their affairs while devolving some authority to the central
bureaucracy. In a federation, primary sovereignty is given to the central
government which exercises control over every member state in areas defined by
but not exclusively including the military, diplomatic relations and the economy.

The predicament of the EU is
that political unity means having a single army, a single currency and unified
border controls.The contradictions that
define a confederation make it inherently too weak to maintain the union and
too conflicted to bring about the equality that is needed to unify its separate
units. In order to work the European Union has
to be an integrated i.e. a federated entity.

If the European Union is
working towards a federated, possibly even a two tier unity then it explains
the Incrementalism which is fundamental to current EU policy. But because of
the inherent dishonesty within this approach the EU must be reformed and this
reform is not liable to happen under current conditions where the debate over
intentions has not even started.

In one lecture I attended
(with thanks to Professor Brendan Simms) it was proposed that Europe
was not a club that many were clambering to join but a shared destiny. “Europe
is Greece, Rome and the Enlightenment” (apologies but I
don’t know who said this).The rejection
of enlightenment principles (some Eastern European nations as well as Turkey have
little experience of the Enlightenment) means that common interests are not
always the reason for joining. Turkey
understands the union as a confederation rather than as a union so it can never
agree to fulfill all of the conditions of full membership. It is on record as
having repeatedly reminded Turkish expatriates that their primary loyalty is to
Turkey and that they must not integrate into their host society (going so far
as to threaten those people who stand aside from the Turkish nation).

People are selected for a
European political sinecure as a means of rewarding them for past service to
their party or as a means of ridding the party of an individual who has become
a political liability or embarrassment. Direct elections to the European
parliament and for top jobs in the European Commission would enhance the
prestige of the European Parliament; it would also herald in an era of
political transparency and accountability. Both are necessary for a healthy
democracy to remain so and entirely missing from the current European
project.

Brendan Simms pointed out that
Poland in 1717 and the Holy Roman Empire (in 1806) disappeared because they
could not reform.Contrast this with The
1707 Act of Union which consolidated power in the United
Kingdom and similarly the USA in the 1780’s.Both created frameworks for unity and a
common identity guaranteed by the power wielded by centralized authority.

“There was a pharaoh and he
knew not Joseph” (Exodus 1.8) this refers to the arrival of a new Egyptian king
who did not know Joseph or his generation of immigrant workers. The textual
reference to forgetting Joseph raises questions about the extent to which oppression
is linked to a minority group's involvement in, and commitment to the larger
society.But it also raises questions
about the historical tensions between host societies and their guest
workers/immigrants and the fears, whether rational or not that makes the debate
so difficult to present.

Simms said that the World War 2
generation are dead and even their children are in the 70’s (at the very least).What happens when they forget the war? The
German people are still very embarrassed by it. But is it not relevant that Poland, Germany,
Greece and France have all
got significant voting populations that have embraced the National Front?I will just point out some of the other
countries with recent electoral results below.

The Swiss People’s party is a right
wing, populist, political party and the largest party in the Swiss Federal
Assembly.It is also Eurosceptic.In Denmark’s general election in 2015 the
Danish People’s Party (described by the media as right and far-right wing)
secured 21% of the vote; in Hungary, the far-right Jobbik Party (described as radical
nationalist) won over 20% of the parliamentary vote.In Austria the Freedom Party polled
49.7% of the vote on 22nd May 2016. Norbert Hofer came within 0.6% of being
elected President of Austria.His party,
founded after WW2 by “former” Nazis is nationalist and anti-immigration, its
credentials are toxic.

Throughout Europe,
nations are not rejecting greater union; they are fighting an identity crisis
they do not see being adequately addressed by their political elite. The issue
of immigration and refugee absorption are part of the debate over European
identity that again, is being ignored because the issues they raise are
apparently too complex for our simple brains to comprehend.

It is this disrespect that
politicians and bureaucrats have for us all that is at the heart of the rise of
fascism in Britain and
throughout Europe.